Tom Cotton on Meet the Press

Ugh... Public confidence in our legal system took another hit this past week after Tom Cotton, Republican senator from Arkansas, took the guest seat on Meet the Press to parrot the MAGA talking points that Trump's guilty verdict was nothing short of rock solid evidence of the Biden administration’s corruption of the justice system

To his credit, the guest host - Doug Alexander - was fending off a torrent of bullshit from the start, with everything from “Woke Militias” to “Trump's reign of peace and prosperity” being thrown into the mix of the attack on reality. Nevertheless, by allowing him to battle his way to a stalemate, all we were left with was simply muddier water then where we started - which is a win for the MAGA playbook.

A question the host might have asked the senator could have been something along the lines of "Do you have any evidence, whatsoever, that can substantiate and support your claim that the current presidential administration is influencing the actions of the New York States Attorney General?”

That would've been a worthwhile question – to which the answer would be, in whatever way he tried to spin it, no.

Then the follow up could have been something like “Because you're a United States Senator, not Alex Jones, or even Sean Hannity, who get paid a lot of money to conjure up and propagate unprovable bullshit in order to advance an agenda that is beneficial to them professionally and financially, but is toxic to US public interest - all while hiding behind the sanctity of the first amendment. As a senator you're supposed to be held to a higher standard of integrity, wouldn't you agree? Or does that all go out the window when you auditioning for vice president by a man who has been proven time and time again to be nothing short of a pathological liar.”

But that’s just another example of the mess our current media ecosystem has devolved into.  It’s more important to get ratings than get to the truth.  And in the lame attempt to pretend to be fair, wholesale conspiracies are given mainstream airtime and legitimized.  Which has just gotten worse and worse over time, and as the standards of integrity that we’ve held in our political leaders has eroded, so has our grasp on any sense of agreed upon reality.  At this point the only difference between a right wing talk show host and an elected official is that the elected official isn’t restricted to spreading party-line bullshit on their own network.